Volume 7, No.1 (Spring 2004)

For the usual readers of free market books, Naked Economics promises exciting reading. Charles Wheelan, an American correspondent of London’s Economist and a lecturer at Northwestern University, promises to “undress the dismal science.” Undressing in this sense means “stripping away all of the diagrams, equations, and jargon” and making it the science of real life. “Dismal” means that misunderstanding of the science that equates it with boredom, vagueness, and sheer dullness that Thomas Carlyle forever smeared economics with. In the Foreword, Burton Malkiel calls the book “truly unique,” because Wheelan succeeds in giving us “a delightfully readable guide to economic literacy.”